Harry Potter Could Learn the Truth About Snape Two Years Sooner, He Just Didn’t Listen
In The Deathly Hallows, Harry is shocked to learn Severus Snape’s true story — but he could have already known it if he paid attention in The Order of the Phoenix.
For almost the entirety of the Harry Potter series, we don’t know the real Severus Snape — mostly, because we only see him through Harry’s eyes, and Harry wants nothing to do with his Potions Professor. It’s only at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that we get a sneak peek into Snape’s past and see who he is.
Snape’s memories come as a revelation to Harry and to us, the readers (or viewers). Everything, from the fact that Dumbledore’s death was planned to Snape’s early friendship with Harry’s mother, Lily, was unexpected… But what if we told you that if Harry had the ability to listen back in the day, he would’ve known that already?
Well, not all of it: there was no way for him to learn about Dumbledore’s death plan. But he definitely could learn about the connection between Lily and Severus.
In The Order of the Phoenix, after the Dementors’ attack, Harry tries to explain to the Dursleys what the creatures that attacked him and Dudley were. When Uncle Vernon doesn’t believe him, Aunt Petunia suddenly makes an unexpected remark.
“I heard — that awful boy — telling her about them — years ago,” she said jerkily.
Harry immediately perks up and tells her to call his parents by their names; Aunt Petunia ignores him, and the conversation moves on. What Harry doesn’t realize, though, is that Petunia only met James Potter when he and Lily were getting married, so he was a grown man by then. She wouldn’t have called him a boy, then.
“That awful boy” Petunia mentions is, of course, Severus Snape: when he met the Evans sister, he was their age, and he was, indeed, really mean to Lily’s older sister. She remembered him as a boy, not James; if Harry paid attention, he could’ve asked the right question and learned about Snape’s connection to his mother early on.
But Harry immediately assumed that Aunt Petunia was talking about his father. On the one hand, he was your average angry teenager back then. On the other hand, though, he just survived a whole bunch of deadly and traumatizing events, and the Dursleys were always mean when talking about his parents, so we can’t blame him.